Creme Bastarde – Recreating a Delicious Medieval Dessert

The middle-ages were a magical time of knights and castles, kings and queens, peasants and priests, and pitched battles….

…and bizarre foods with hilarious names, many of which are now lost to time.

One of my favourite hobbies is recreating medieval foods from the original manuscripts. I tend to post my medieval creations to my personal facebook page, and they usually get a good response from my friends. So I thought it might make an interesting blog post to go through how I work out these centuries old recipes!

Today I am resurrecting a delicious medieval dessert from 1430 – Creme Bastarde!

My full modern recipe can be found at the end of this post!

Creme bastarde is a thick but fairly light dessert, very similar to a modern gelatine dish like panna cotta or Spanish cream. It is sweet, and flavoured with honey, but not so much that it overpowers the dessert.

It goes great with fruit! Apples, pears, oranges, and most stone fruit and berries were all seasonally available at this time in Medieval England. Probably not bananas though! Nutmeg and cinnamon were also available!

As is typical for me, I chose this dish simply because the name is amusing. Before starting I had no idea what I was making or how the end result should look or taste. But working that out is half the fun of cooking medieval meals!

Professional cookbooks first appeared in England around 1390 with The forme of Curry (‘curry’ originally meant ‘cooking’ in old English) – a scroll of recipes written by the royal cooks of King Richard II. Medieval cookbooks weren’t written for the masses. They were written for kings, partly to record the kings favourite meals so that new cooks could be quickly brought up to speed, and partly so that kings could show off the lavish food they were eating to other kings!

Because these scrolls were written for professional cooks by professional cooks, they very seldomly included the amounts of ingredients or cooking times. The thinking was that a royal cook would know how long to bake a pastry, or how much cinnamon will taste good with the other ingredients. So why bother writing it down?

This makes things tricky for us trying to work out the recipes seven centuries later.

As an aside, what we would consider modern recipe books, including ingredient amounts and cooking times, began appearing around the 17th century.

These early cookbooks are written in middle English, and commonly include at least two letters that have dropped out of the modern alphabet; ſ – the ‘long S, typically used when you wanted a hard ‘S’ sound, and þ – ‘thorn’, a letter that represented the ‘th’ sound.

Then you have the obsolete prefixes i- and y- that give the proceeding verb a past tense. Descriptive words that are no longer used. Phonetic spelling. Medieval shorthand. And archaic names for ingredients – the best example of this being ‘egg’, which is a word introduced by the Vikings. The original English word for egg is eyroun.

The recipe for creme bastarde comes from the medieval cookbook, academically named, Harleian manuscript 297. The manuscript was written around 1430 during the reign of King Henry VI, and it is probable that it was written by the royal cooks but this is not known.

Incidentally this was the same year Joan of Arc was captured.

My translation of the middle English:

Take the white of eggs, a great heap, and put them in a pan full of milk, and let it boil. Then season it with salt and a little honey, then let it cool and draw it through a strainer. Take fair cows milk [i.e. good quality clean milk – in this case it would be milk that had already been sterilised] and draw it with-all [add it to the mixture] and season it with sugar so that it be very sweet. Serve it forth as a pottage [a very thick soup], or as a good baked food [i.e. in a pastry], which ever that you would.

In typical medieval fashion, this recipe doesn’t give ingredient amounts or cooking times.

In the other recipes I’ve attempted this hasn’t been much of a problem – with something like gingerbread you have an idea of what you are making and how the end result should look and taste. The individual details can be worked out with trial and error.

But I choose this recipe based solely on its funny name. It isn’t immediately clear what it is that the recipe is actually making…

The first thing to do is to break it into steps.

• Add egg whites to milk and bring the mixture to boil.
• Add salt and a honey.
• Let the mixture cool and then pass it through a strainer.
• Add fresh milk to the mixture and season with sugar.

Then, we can also glean some idea of what the dish is from the recipe.

Historically eggs were used as a thickener for milk – the best example being custard. The use of the whites of a “great many” eggs implies that we aren’t making a particularly runny dish like a sauce, but something much more substantial. The medieval recipe also describes creme bastarde as being served as a ‘pottage’. This is a very thick soup made from meat and vegetables boiled down into a pulp in a bone broth, reinforcing that the end result is thick.

It’s also being drawn through a strainer to remove all the lumps. So, it has a smooth texture.

I was unsure on an exact translation of “poynant and doucet” as stated in the medieval recipe. ‘Poynant’ in middle English meant an acidic, sour, or sharp flavour, while ‘doucet’ meant sweet. There is nothing in the recipe that would make this dish sour – so I can only think that poynant was being used to mean ‘strongly flavoured’.

It would appear that the recipe is telling us to make the dish very sweet.

From all of this we can surmise that creme bastarde is a thickened milk dish, similar in consistency to a thick custard or a modern gelation dish like Spanish cream, with a very sweet honey flavour.

But we still don’t know the amounts of ingredients or the cooking times.

With that in mind I started looking at other historical cookbooks for similar dishes to use as a reference.

The 1623 edition of The English Huswife, by Gervase Markham – written about 200 years after Harly MS 297 – has the recipe for “a white tart” that has a filling very similar to the medieval creme bastarde. So much so that it is almost certainly a direct descendant of that earlier recipe.

Unfortunately, this cookbook also doesn’t include the amounts of the ingredients, but it does include some critical preparation instructions.

• The milk and egg mixture must be boiled until it ‘curdles’ and the mixture goes very thick.
• Once in the strainer any liquid whey needs to be allowed to run off and is then discarded. The result is a very thick dish with no liquid.

My next stop was William Babisha’s wonderfully named 1673 volume The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and Fully Manifested, Methodically, Artificially, and according to the best Tradition of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, etc.

Of particular interest Babisha gives a recipe for ‘dowcets’ which includes a pale custard filling very similar to the recipe for creme bastarde. But importantly it gives the amounts of the ingredients!

Babisha includes 14 eggs, 10 of which are the whites only, added to 2 quarts of cream (about 2.27 litres). And half a pound of sugar for sweetening, which is insanely sweet!

I felt I now had as good a foundation for making creme bastarde as I was going to get. Doing some conversions to metric I decided on 8 eggs per 400ml of milk. This is more than the Babisha recipe, but as the medieval recipe uses milk and not cream, I thought the extra egg would probably be needed help thicken the dish.

The amount of sugar suggested by Babisha is huge. While this certainly does fit the description of ‘poynant & Doucet’ in the medieval manuscript, and may well be what the medieval cooks intended, my experiments found that this amount of sugar made the dish much too sweet to eat.

It is important to note that the medieval recipe says to ‘season’ the dish with sugar. This, too me, suggests adding only a small amount of sugar to the dish rather than the mountain Babisha recommends.

But this makes sense. The two recipes reflect the times in which they were written. In the 1430s sugar was an expensive import and was really only accessible by the ruling class – kings and lords. By the 17th century sugar cultivation had been expanded through north Africa and into Southern Spain by Arab merchants. This made sugar a lot more accessible. But at the same time there was a growing merchant class in Europe that was keen to show off its wealth. And lavish dinner parties with a lot of sugar were a very popular way of doing this.

Then there was the question of which type of milk to use. While the later recipes use cream, the medieval manuscript very clearly states milk. The medieval cooks were using raw milk straight from the cow. I’m not sure this is legal to sell in NZ – so I had to settle for Meadow Fresh full cream ‘farmhouse’ pasteurised milk as a modern equivalent.

Finally, the medieval recipe has you add more fresh milk to the boiled egg and milk mixture after it has been strained. This is not done in the 17th century recipes. Again, this isn’t surprising. The medieval creme bastarde is being served as a meal on its own, and the extra milk is presumably being added to reintroduce some liquid to make it a little more palatable when eaten on its own. By contrast the later recipes are making fillings for tarts, which probably benefits from keeping the mixture stiffer.

So, with all that done I could start experimenting. After a couple of attempts I came up with something that I feel accurately reproduces what the medieval cooks were making.

A simple, sweet, honey flavoured, dessert similar to a modern panna cotta, that goes great with summer fruits and a little nutmeg.

Recipe:

• 500ml high fat milk
• 9 egg whites (I used size 7 eggs)
• 2.5 table spoons honey
• Pinch of salt
• Sugar to taste (I used about a teaspoon)

Add 400ml of milk to a saucepan. Add the eggs whites and bring the mixture to the boil over a low heat. Stir continuously to stop the mixture burning on the bottom of the pan. Once boiling remove from the heat and add a pinch of salt and the honey. Return to the heat and continue to stir until the mixture goes thick – about 5 to 10 minutes.

Once thickened allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. Once cooled pour the mixture into a sieve and allow any liquid to run off. Discard the liquid. Take a spoon and push the mixture through the sieve breaking up any lumps.

Finally, mix the remining 100ml of fresh milk into the mixture. Serve with summer fruits.